Ingredients for a good meme: Cognitive, emotional, and social factors of internet meme appreciation.
Year: 2025
Type: article
Study design: Observational Study
Abstract: Internet memes are multimodal digital artifacts that pervade social media platforms. Despite their global popularity as powerful communication devices, their significance in the cognitive sciences remains understudied. In this exploratory study, we collected data from N = 1,157 participants to uncover the cognitive and emotional factors influencing the consumption and appreciation of internet memes. Participants rated 300 user-generated memes, providing overall ratings, evaluating nine cognitive features, and reporting intensities of 16 emotional categories. Exploratory factor analysis revealed five latent factors: humor, fluency, disfluency, positive emotions, and negative emotions. In a cross-validated regression model, the five factors accurately predicted overall ratings of new internet memes within about a half-point margin (mean absolute error = 0.54). Humor, amusement, and lack of boredom emerged as robust predictors, while positive emotions like adoration, satisfaction, and compassion also played significant roles. A balance between fluency and disfluency was found to be important for successful internet memes, whereas negative emotions (e.g., anger, disgust, and frustration) significantly decreased overall ratings. This study highlights the potential of internet memes for research in empirical aesthetics, media psychology, and advertising, shedding light on the cognitive and emotional factors underlying meme consumption and appreciation.
DOI: 10.1037/aca0000744
Language: English
Subfield: Social Psychology
Field: Psychology
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
Award: G1586928922
OpenAlex ID: W4407762309